F1 at Zolder: Unravelling the history of Belgium's other iconic circuit

Motor Sport’s continental correspondent Denis Jenkinson – aka Jenks or DSJ – devoted the first paragraph of his 1973 Belgian Grand Prix report to denouncing the abandonment of Spa, blaming “JY Stewart and his small but vociferous band” for the aberration, ending that vituperative opening par with the words “moving the race to Zolder is such a huge joke that it is no longer funny but depressing in the extreme”.

Nonetheless, a couple of paragraphs farther on, Jenks had to admit that Zolder itself “is not all that bad, exudes quite a pleasant atmosphere, is situated on sandy heathland amid pine trees, and is infinitely more agreeable than Nivelles”. But his bilious resentment towards the disappearance of Spa was evident throughout his Zolder report, and he was annoyed that the agent-in-chief of the removal of “a great and pure road race”, Jackie Stewart, cruised his Tyrrell 006 to victory on the circuit that had usurped it, for he ended his piece with the words… “Stewart just drove away from everyone, the most disastrous Belgian Grand Prix of all time quietly fizzled out, and one had the feeling that, if it was an example of the way grand prix racing is going, then we ought to fold the whole thing up before it becomes the laughing stock of the rest of the world”. You thought journalists moaning about F1 was a new thing? You thought wrong.

Zolder was and is a pretty decent circuit, actually, and it has changed little over the past half-century. Its first four turns are medium-speed bends that flow together smoothly, then Turn 5 is a dynamic chicane. Turn 6 is quick, Turn 8 tight. In 1973 Turn 7 was a fast right-hander, and it was quicker still in 1982 when the F1 cars that hurtled through it were much more powerful and far more grippy than they had been nine years before.

There and then it was that the great Gilles Villeneuve lost his life in qualifying for the 1982 Belgian Grand Prix, and, in an effort to slow things down in the wake of the tragedy, since 1986 Turn 7 has been a finicky chicane. It is now named after him, understandably, but it is not in truth a fitting tribute.

In 1974 the Belgian Grand Prix was held at Nivelles – for the second and last time – but the race was back at Zolder for 1975. Niki Lauda dominated it in his flat-12 Ferrari, winning easily from the pole, and he did the same thing – in the same place – the following year.

The 1977 Belgian Grand Prix at Zolder was damp and dull, marred as it was by the lap-one elimination of the two pre-race favourites, Mario Andretti (Lotus) and John Watson (Brabham-Alfa), the result of Andretti’s nerfing both of them into retirement at the Turn 5 chicane, but the race now has a safe and soft spot in many F1 devotees’ hearts, and it certainly does in mine. It was won by Gunnar Nilsson, Andretti’s team-mate at Lotus, a hugely talented young driver who was just entering his prime.

He DNF’d with a broken wheel bearing in the next grand prix, his home race at Anderstorp, then he was fourth at Dijon and third at Silverstone. But the last seven grands prix of his season all resulted in DNFs. Why so, we wondered? What had gone wrong? It was only in December, during a routine medical check-up, that he found out what had been undermining his form: he had terminal cancer. He died the following year, aged just 29, in London’s Charing Cross Hospital, refusing pain-killing meds in his final weeks so as to remain alert enough to set up the Gunnar Nilsson Cancer Foundation, which exists to this day. A proper hero.

At Zolder in 1978 Andretti made no mistake, giving the world’s first true ground-effect F1 car, the beautiful Lotus 79, its maiden grand prix victory. In 1979, also at Zolder, Jody Scheckter scored his first grand prix win for Ferrari, and in 1980 Didier Pironi stroked his stunningly attractive Ligier JS11/15 to his maiden grand prix win there, thrashing the previously ascendant Williams FW07Bs of Alan Jones and Carlos Reutemann by the thick end of a minute. The next year, 1981, Reutemann got his own back, winning from a dominant pole position and carving fastest lap on the way, but on the podium his face was downcast and he sprayed no Champagne.

Zolder’s pit lane had always been crazily narrow, and during Friday practice an Osella mechanic, Giovanni Amadeo, had fallen off the pit wall in front of Reutemann’s Williams FW07C. There had been no space into which Reutemann could swerve, and, through no fault of his own, he ran the lad over. He was taken to the University Hospital in Leuven, 30 miles (48km) south-west of the circuit, with a double skull fracture. He fell into a coma and on the Monday after the race he succumbed to his injuries. He was just 21. Reutemann later visited his parents in Italy: a mark of the man.

And then came Zolder 1982, which will always be mourned as the weekend on which we lost Gilles Villeneuve, and rightly so, the 32-year-old Canadian having been catapulted out of his airborne Ferrari by the force of its multiple impacts with Jochen Mass’s Arrows, the armco and the asphalt, into which it had bounced violently several times. When Villeneuve came to a stop against the catch fencing, he was still harnessed to his seat, but his helmet had been torn off. Bravely, McLaren’s John Watson and Toleman’s Derek Warwick jumped out of their cars to tend to their dying rival. Watson remembers that, when he reached him, he still had a pulse, but he was not breathing, and his face was turning blue.

The next day, showing not only the great skill but also the sheer guts that characterised one of the most underrated drivers of his era, Wattie won the race brilliantly, charging through the field from 12th on the grid, taking the lead on the penultimate lap. On the podium he managed a thin smile and waved briefly to the crowd. “Someone had to win the bloody thing,” he said to me 20-odd years later, with the same thin smile.

I did not go to any of those races, for in 1985 Spa was reinstated as the home of the Belgian Grand Prix, and I did not attend overseas F1 races until I began to write about them in the early 1990s. It was not until May 2019 that I finally went to Zolder, when it staged the second ever race in the W Series, for which I was then working as communications director.

That half-hour sprint was won by Beitske Visser, but her victory is not what I remember most clearly about the weekend. No, the memory that sits vividly in my mind still, and always will, is walking the track the day before with 1970s Aurora British F1 and Shellsport International Series driver Divina Galica, already 75 in 2019 but then as now both energetic and enthusiastic, whom we had engaged as a mentor to the W Series drivers, some of whom had had no single-seater experience. As Divina and I passed the Turn 7 chicane – Gilles Villeneuve Bocht – ahead of us we saw a large 27 chalked on the tyre wall on the right-hand side of the track. Even the font was right. We stopped and stared at it for some time. I took a photograph. Neither of us felt able to say anything, nor did we need to.